Pages

Monday, February 1, 2016

Mailbox Monday (2/1/16 edition)

Mailbox Monday is hosted here. I've received a few new books recently:

Received through TLC Book Tours and the publisher:

Free Men by Katy Simpson Smith

In 1788 three men
converge in the southern woods of what is now Alabama: Cat, an
emotionally scarred white man; Bob, a garrulous black man fleeing
slavery; and Istillicha, who seeks retribution after being edged out of
his Creek town’s leadership.

In the few days they spend together,
the makeshift trio commits a shocking murder that soon has the forces
of the law bearing down upon them. Sent to pick up their trail, a
probing French tracker named Le Clerc must decide which has a greater
claim: swift justice or his own curiosity about how three such
disparate, desperate men could act in unison.

Katy Simpson Smith
skillfully brings into focus men whose lives are both catastrophic and
full of hope—and illuminates the beating heart of a new America. A
captivating exploration of how four men grapple with the importance of
family, the stain of guilt, and the competing forces of power, love,
race, and freedom.

The Golden Son by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Anil is the cherished
son of a large family in rural India. As the eldest boy, he is expected
to inherit the role of leader of his clan and arbiter of its disputes,
dispensing wisdom and good advice. Leena is his closest companion, a
fiercely brave girl who loves nothing more than the wild terrain they
inhabit and her close-knit family. As childhood friends, they are
inseparable—but as adulthood approaches, they grow apart.

Anil is
the first person in his family to leave India, the first to attend
college, the first to become a doctor. Half a world away in Dallas,
Texas, he is caught up in his new life, experiencing all the freedoms
and temptations of American culture: he tastes alcohol for the first
time, falls in love, and learns firsthand about his adopted country’s
alluring, dangerous contradictions. Though his work in a gritty urban
hospital is grueling, Anil is determined to carve out his own life in
America.

At home, Leena dreams of marriage, a strong and true
love like the one shared by her parents, and leaves her beloved home to
join her new husband’s family in a distant village.

Then things
start to go wrong: Anil makes a medical mistake with tragic results, his
first love begins to fray and a devastating event makes him question
his worth as a doctor and as a friend. On a visit home, Anil rekindles a
friendship with the woman who seems to understand him better than
anyone else. But their relationship is complicated by a fateful decision
made years earlier.

As the two old friends discover each other
again, they must also weigh the choice between responsibility and
freedom, and between loyalty and love.

Received from LibraryThing:

The Vegetarian by Han KangBefore the nightmare,
Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering,
blood-soaked images start haunting her thoughts, Yeong-hye decides to
purge her mind and renounce eating meat. In a country where societal
mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision to embrace a more
“plant-like” existence is a shocking act of subversion. And as her
passive rebellion manifests in ever more extreme and frightening forms,
scandal, abuse, and estrangement begin to send Yeong-hye spiraling deep
into the spaces of her fantasy. In a complete metamorphosis of both mind
and body, her now dangerous endeavor will take Yeong-hye—impossibly,
ecstatically, tragically—far from her once-known self altogether.

A disturbing, yet beautifully composed narrative told in three parts, The Vegetarian
is an allegorical novel about modern day South Korea, but also a story
of obsession, choice, and our faltering attempts to understand others,
from one imprisoned body to another.

Got through the Book of the Month Club:

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties.

It
is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the
South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his
trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage
aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his
compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among
their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the
group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the
story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a
poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but
returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy
novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love
story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

An extraordinary literary work, Dear Mr. You
renders the singular arc of a woman’s life through letters Mary-Louise
Parker composes to the men, real and hypothetical, who have informed the
person she is today. Beginning with the grandfather she never knew, the
letters range from a missive to the beloved priest from her childhood
to remembrances of former lovers to an homage to a firefighter she
encountered to a heartfelt communication with the uncle of the infant
daughter she adopted. Readers will be amazed by the depth and style of
these letters, which reveal the complexity and power to be found in
relationships both loving and fraught.

The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner

Ruth Wariner was the
thirty-ninth of her father’s forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in
rural Mexico, where authorities turned a blind eye to the practices of
her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing
or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the
wicked by destroying the world and that women can only ascend to Heaven
by entering into polygamous marriages and giving birth to as many
children as possible. After Ruth's father--the man who had been the
founding prophet of the colony--is brutally murdered by his brother in a
bid for church power, her mother remarries, becoming the second wife of
another faithful congregant.

In need of government assistance
and supplemental income, Ruth and her siblings are carted back and forth
between Mexico and the United States, where her mother collects welfare
and her step-father works a variety of odd jobs. Ruth comes to love the
time she spends in the States, realizing that perhaps the community
into which she was born is not the right one for her. As Ruth begins to
doubt her family’s beliefs and question her mother’s choices, she
struggles to balance her fierce love for her siblings with her
determination to forge a better life for herself.

Recounted from the innocent and hopeful perspective of a child, The Sound of Gravel
is the remarkable true story of a girl fighting for peace and love.
This is an intimate, gripping tale of triumph, courage, and resilience.

Ghettoside by Jill Leovy

On a warm spring
evening in South Los Angeles, a young man was shot and killed on a
sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of hundreds of young men slain
in LA every year. His assailant ran down the street, jumped into an SUV,
and vanished, hoping to join the vast majority of killers in American
cities who are never arrested for their crimes. But as soon as the case
was assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shifted. Here is the
kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential American murder--one young
black man slaying another--and a determined crew of detectives whose
creed was to pursue justice at all costs for its forgotten victims. Ghettoside
is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait
of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new
lens into the great subject of murder in America--why it happens and how
the plague of killings might yet be stopped.

Purchased from Barnes and Noble:

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

When four classmates
from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way,
they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition.
There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted,
sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world;
Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn,
brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over
the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction,
success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to
realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator
yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an
unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of
trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define
his life forever.